Catching My Breath

You don't catch your breath. You stop running long enough for it to catch up with you.

Dana Harper did the hard part already. Or so she thought.

Three years ago, she walked away from a thirty-year marriage to a man who needed to know where she was every minute of every day, and who, it turned out, had reasons of his own for keeping track. Since then she's rebuilt from the studs: an apartment that's entirely hers, a high school English classroom she loves, weekly visits with her grandbabies, and every-other-Tuesday sessions with a therapist who won't let her off easy.

She's fine. Really. She's even starting to believe it.

Then her phone rings, and it's Leslie. The little sister who walked away from her in a church parking lot after their mother's funeral. Five years of silence, and suddenly Leslie wants to meet for lunch at Leonardo's, in their old booth, like no time has passed.

Getting her sister back is everything Dana hoped for. But it means deciding how much truth Leslie can carry while her own world is cracking open. Because there's one part of Dana's divorce she has never told anyone. The part that happened while they were losing their mother.

Meanwhile, her friend Teresa has signed her up for speed dating. Her daughter keeps sending heart emojis. And a widowed contractor named Michael, who isn't ready for anything either, keeps showing up for lunch anyway.

Between a crowded Thanksgiving, a recipe box holding a hundred and twelve cards in their mother's handwriting, and a New Year's Eve conversation she's been dreading for years, Dana discovers that healing isn't something you finish. It's something you keep choosing.

Catching My Breath is Book 2 of the Breath Trilogy, the story of Leslie's big sister. Heartfelt, clean women's fiction about grief, second chances, and the sister who knew you first.